You need to hang up a picture. What do you do?
a) You neighbor tells you you need a stud finder, a self-leveling cross line laser, digital measure, calculator, percussion drill and one or more anchor screws. You have no idea what half of those things are, but you find an online tutorial to learn how to use them and at the end, you make the perfect hook. (1 point)
b) You laugh at your neighbor and use a nail and a hammer. (0 points)
You need to leave your husband/wife a note to remind him/her to pick up your daughter after school. What do you do?
a) You buy a new 12-core Mac Pro, MS Office 2011, Adobe Font Folio and a color laser printer, install everything and take a course in typography. Then you lay out and print the perfectly designed note. (1 point)
b) You use a piece of scrap paper and a pencil. (0 points)
If you got 2 points, then Controller Mate is the right choice for you. Of course, SOMETIMES you actually need all those tools to hang a picture. SOME people, professional designers perhaps, need a fancy computer to produce notes. Most of us don't.
I found Controller Mate absolute overkill, apparently very powerful, but impossible to figure out without studying tutorials, and I'm usually VERY good at the "jump in and wing it" method, even with complicated software. Controller Mate lets you do very complex setups with multi-conditional button assignments, interdependencies, logic gates and math calculations. I may not be imaginative enough, but to me, it seems like a solution in search of a problem. I have a hard time envisioning use cases for most of these things, but I'm sure some hard-core gamers out there or other special-case users will find it a godsend and are willing to go through the extensive tutorial to get it to work.
If you're like me and just need that damn game pad to work, Controller Mate is the definition of "crack a nut with a sledgehammer". I have a Thrustmaster Firestorm Digital 3 gamepad that I wanted to play the Defendoid game from the awesome TV series JPod with. It has a digital D-pad which I wanted to map to the arrow keys. Seems straight-forward enough right? Controller Mate recognized the D-pad as X and Y axis producing values of 0, 128 or 255. To assign keys, you need to convert that somehow into an On/Off signal using math operator "building blocks" that you arrange in a flow-chart type graphical layout. If that sounds like overcomplicating things, it's because it is. I tried various ways going back and forth between tutorial and application and, after about 30 minutes, gave up in frustration.
Installed a different USB driver app and setup was as straight forward as: press button on game pad, press key you want to assign. 2 minutes later I was playing. Kambamthankyoumaam.